Wait what, germany has sucky internet? I had no clue as most other EU countries seem to do very good as far as i know.

The French claim being the ones who make the best cheese and wine, and they're famous for spending 2/3 of their income for food and for making cars where you can't feel the clutch coming and don't know which gear you are in, but you still somehow arrive at your destination, without knowing how you did it. For someone like this, not having the fastest possible internet isn't embarrassing.

To give a comparison what "rank #26/27" means, Romania is rank #6/#7, the Czech are #13. Portugal is #23 or #25 (depending on which metric you look at).

Yeah, Australia ranks pretty low (#39), but they are pretty darn far away with really not that many cables going there, and they have a pretty darn big continent with darn hostile environment, too. For that, what they're doing is awesome. I can ping a server located in Alice Springs (which is basically two dozen houses in the middle of... well, Dune) and still get a reliable RTT of 330-335ms. That's fucking awesome.

With that being said, after half a year of silence, I finally received a notice today that my provider is planning to finally roll out VSDL in just under 3 weeks from now (on the 30th). The letter states that it may not happen on the 30th exactly, and that it may not work. Whether it works is not certain, but it is certain that either way service will be disrupted for at least 2 hours on the 30th. If it doesn't work after that, I am to call their service line. Which of course I cannot possibly do on a pure VoIP telephone line if ATM/DSL doesn't work, since in that case nothing works, service and emergency calls included.

Out of curiosity, what is the problem in the US? Too many users?

Is it that the major lines are limited by the total throughput of whole states or the whole country, or is the limit in more local connectivity?

Wait what, germany has sucky internet? I had no clue as most other EU countries seem to do very good as far as i know.

It ranks at #26 or #27 (depending on which metric you look at) in akamai's newest report. That is already a great deal better than a year before when it ranked #33, but honestly... for a country that isn't precisely a development country, this is pretty embarrassing. Not quite as bad as France (which was #37 and still is #37), but France doesn't claim to be the Superior Race and the number one technology nation which does everything best.

The French claim being the ones who make the best cheese and wine, and they're famous for spending 2/3 of their income for food and for making cars where you can't feel the clutch coming and don't know which gear you are in, but you still somehow arrive at your destination, without knowing how you did it. For someone like this, not having the fastest possible internet isn't embarrassing.

To give a comparison what "rank #26/27" means, Romania is rank #6/#7, the Czech are #13. Portugal is #23 or #25 (depending on which metric you look at).

Yeah, Australia ranks pretty low (#39), but they are pretty darn far away with really not that many cables going there, and they have a pretty darn big continent with darn hostile environment, too. For that, what they're doing is awesome. I can ping a server located in Alice Springs (which is basically two dozen houses in the middle of... well, Dune) and still get a reliable RTT of 330-335ms. That's fucking awesome.

With that being said, after half a year of silence, I finally received a notice today that my provider is planning to finally roll out VSDL in just under 3 weeks from now (on the 30th). The letter states that it may not happen on the 30th exactly, and that it may not work. Whether it works is not certain, but it is certain that either way service will be disrupted for at least 2 hours on the 30th. If it doesn't work after that, I am to call their service line. Which of course I cannot possibly do on a pure VoIP telephone line if ATM/DSL doesn't work, since in that case nothing works, service and emergency calls included.

Wait, how are they doing their ranking? I'm french and everyone i know has 100mbit 500mbit or 1gig in big cities and everyone else adsl2 with VDSL coming, i haven't heard of someone having anything less than the regular 20mbit dsl offer for like 10 years except in the most remote areas.

Out of curiosity, what is the problem in the US? Too many users?

Is it that the major lines are limited by the total throughput of whole states or the whole country, or is the limit in more local connectivity?

Distance and variability. The US is huge.

Hooking up a metro area with a dense population is not that bad. In particularly dense population areas there are established conduits between buildings, running fiber and cable between them is cheap and easy. Major 'downtown' areas have no problem getting high speed internet that way. There are about 70 cities in the US with population densities over 2000 per square kilometer. 30 are over 3000 per square km. 6 are over 5000 per square km. Running cables from building to building is inexpensive.

Head out a little bit from that dense population area and you get suburban sprawl. There are many thousands of suburban areas, city outskirts, bedroom communities, and small towns around 500-1500 people per square km. The "last mile" problem is enormous, running cables to several hundred million buildings is not an easy problem.

While those regions account for most of the population, they are only a small amount of the land area.

After that, you've got a lot of low-population land. Wikipedia says the US has just over 9 million square kilometers of land, and is the 3rd/4th largest nation depending on how China is counted. (The largest are Russia at 17M, Canada at 10M, then US/China at about 9M with disputes over various islands and territories.) That is a lot of land. Even driving directly between cities at 120 kph on the highways, in many parts of the country it can take 6 hours or more to travel from one major city to another. Driving to a distant city can mean 2-5 days of travel. Many of the Europeans I've met over the years struggle to grasp just how much nearly-empty space there is in the US.

Most of that land is extremely sparse population-wise, open fields and farmland, populated with about 50 million people across 6.7 million square km of space. Most of these areas suffer the same problems as Australia. Imagine roughly 15 sparsely-populated Sweedens needing to be criss-crossed with wires.

Wait, how are they doing their ranking? I'm french and everyone i know has 100mbit 500mbit or 1gig in big cities

They are not explaining in detail how every metric is determined exactly, but most of it is pretty clear, and the rest you can figure.

They count unique IP addresses and geolocate them, look at how many are using IPv6, and measure the connection speed in an unspecified way. Then they sort them into 4M, 10M, 15M buckets.

As akamai has hardly a way of doing something different, and because they present some "weird" metrics (such as average peak bandwidth -- you would think either something is average or peak, unless they do an average of peaks in addition to the average, and their average peak values are certainly much lower than what some people have) those are obviously from measuring the download speed from the akamai servers.

So, while you might have 200M, you might only get 30M when downloading from their distribution network, for a variety of reasons (like, slower country uplink despite last mile being fast, or whatever). They'll collect that data and do an average over your country, and an average of fastest speeds per IP. Something like that.

I'm aware that "le fibre 200M" has been advertized in the window of numericable in every major city in France for at least 5 years (and I remember at least Vodafone doing that, too). Though I'm not sure what excuses you will get to hear if you try outside Paris, Marseille, Montpellier, Lyon, or Toulouse. I wouldn't think it's nearly that easy to get 200M or 500M in, say, Mont-de-Marsan or Bergerac, or... I don't know... Paimpol?

If only any such a thing as 100M or 200M was available here at all, even if was only lies and promises.

Outside 3 or 4 select cities (Leipzig comes to mind, for example, Berlin surely, and M-Net does fiber-to-home, too) there's no way you can get fiber, the best thing you can have, in theory, is VDSL which limits you to 50M, and possibly in a year or two, you might get VDSL with vectoring at 100M.

So far, they're not even able to reliably provide full-speed ADSL2+, though. The next DSLAM is 220 meters away from my house cable-wise (ca. 160m line of sight), which would easily make 25M possible via ADSL2+ (still possible at over twice, nearly three times the distance), so the 16M that they promise should be absolutely no problem. Alas, they fail at even providing that, I'm at 13.4M right now and I'm among the lucky few (there's people in the neighbourhood getting half as much).

There is presently a dispute going on over vectoring, since Telekom have their foot in the door, and the government has given them some kind of questionable monopoly again (which competitors complain about) and there appear to be no plans to do fiber-to-home outside large cities any time soon as long as they can as well use the existing copper wires which have already been written off.

Yeah of course, I could move into a big city... but I don't want that. Bad air quality, everything is dirty, and there's loads of traffic, crime, disease, a lot of unfriendly, untidy and unkind, stinking people, punks and clochards, and everyone and everything is in a big haste all the time. I like having a garden and listening to the birds sing when I take my breakfast on the terrace. I like eating raspberries from my garden and drinking my own wine. No intention whatsoever to move into a hellhole of a city. But does that necessarily have to mean that getting reasonably fast internet is impossible?